John M. Ford on art and death

"The poet and essayist Frederick Turner noted that, despite the current techno-bleat about artificial realities, the technology to store human personality has been mature for a long, long time. We call it Art. Whenever the Ninth is played, or Huckleberry Finn is read, or Falstaff catechizes, Beethoven and Twain and Shakespeare are recreated. It is something less than having them across the dinner table from you, to be sure, but it is also something a good deal greater than death."

I was listening to the radio earlier and they were about to play Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and shared the story that Mussorgsky wrote it to honour a friend of his who was an artist... and now (the announcer continued) the artist is long gone and Mussorgsky is long gone but we have this music in which we can see and hear the artist and Mussorgsky, his friend.

I thought that was lovely.

(It also, incidentally, is one of the ways the rabbi talked about eternal life when at the unveiling of my uncle's headstone)